| Information | Review |
|---|---|
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Yanxin Liu
BCHM461 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/01/2026 |
Dr. Liu mostly just reads off the slides during lectures and adds in a few extra examples here and there. However, there are some slides you wouldn't be able to understand without his explanations, so I recommend attending the lectures. The pacing of his lectures can be somewhat inconsistent; sometimes he spends a few minutes on one slide, and other times he speeds through 5 slides before I can write a sentence. Dr. Liu takes time to answer questions in class and will wait around for a few minutes after class to answer questions. I heard from other students in the class that Dr. Liu doesn't really respond to emails, so I'd recommend going to office hours or asking after class for questions. I felt that he was very approachable, and he was good at explaining the more difficult concepts in a simple manner. I felt like his lectures were pretty organized since they each taught about an overarching topic. He doesn't record, but he does post the lecture slides before class. As for content, the last third of the class definitely had the hardest material since you had to memorize a bunch of different equations and know how to derive them. We also didn't cover some stuff that the other BCHM461 sections did, like nucleic acids; we only covered proteins and enzymes. There was a recommended textbook for this class, but I've never used it. Your grade is based solely on exams. There are 800 points total, with 200 points for each of 2 midterms and 400 points for the final. The final grade is curved with a roughly 30:30:30:10 split for each letter grade (A/B/C/D). Within each split, the top 20% get the + and the bottom 20% get the -. The exams are graded leniently, with lots of partial credit for the free-response portion. For the first exam, Dr. Liu posted non-graded optional homework problems, but they were pulled straight from the textbook and did not help on the exam. He stopped posting homework for the rest of the exams, so our only practice problems were the GSS worksheets. Milana's GSS worksheets were SO helpful in studying for every exam, and some exam questions were basically carbon copies of her problems. If you study your notes and use the GSS worksheets as practice problems, I feel like the exams were doable and didn't have any trick questions. Without the GSS worksheets, I wouldn't know how to apply the lecture content to exam questions. The GSS worksheets also outline the most important concepts that will probably be tested. The lecture before each exam, Dr. Liu would also go over the topics he would include on the exam. The 1st midterm and the final were really tight on time, so make sure you know your concepts well. The 2nd midterm was really easy with an average around 90%, so I think Dr. Liu made the final harder to lower the average. Each midterm had 10 multiple-choice questions worth 10 points each, and 5 free-response questions with multiple parts each. The multiple choice for the midterms was really easy and pretty much free points. The final had a similar format, but with 5 more free-response questions, and the multiple choice was select all correct answers. The select all multiple choice was also all-or-nothing, so if you missed one answer, it's an instant -10 points. The final had 30 extra credit points, and calculators were allowed on all exams. All exams were graded and returned promptly, and while Dr. Liu wouldn't post an answer key, he would go over all of the exam questions in class after handing them back. Reviewing the midterms was good practice for the final. |
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Yanxin Liu
BCHM461 Expecting a W Anonymous 10/07/2025 |
If I could give this professor 0 stars, I would. His exams are genuinely unfair. He said certain material wouldn’t appear on the exam and included it anyway. Several questions covered topics that weren’t taught or were only mentioned briefly, yet they were weighted just as heavily as major, complex problems (like drawing full peptide structures with correct pKa values). The entire grade depends on exams (there are no assignments or other ways to reinforce learning or recover from one bad test). Communication was also an issue. He doesn’t respond to emails in a timely way (I had to follow up in person on something time-sensitive, and his response was “oh, I forgot”). Homework (optional btw) was posted late and often just listed problem numbers from the textbook, with no effort to format or organize them. Overall, I found the course disorganized, poorly communicated, and graded in a way that didn’t reflect what was actually taught. |